It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that marketing is evolving. But too many companies think that marketing is just something that’s done by their marketing departments and delegating responsibility to them is sufficient.
It turns out that this model is getting a little bit out of date. The idea that there are people in companies who create products and people who sell them, is slowly starting to go out of the window.
So what can companies do to change their ways?
Understand That Sales Is A Process
If there’s one thing that sales teams have a hard thing understanding, it’s that sales is a process. Rarely do people show up at your company, know exactly what they want, and buy it without fuss. The reality is that most buyers will display a lot of resistance before agreeing to part with their money.
Both sales and non-sales teams understand this, but sales teams seem to believe that you have to start from scratch with each customer and convince them of the value of your product.
Of course, this isn’t true. By the time a customer gets to your sales team, they should already be well on their way to buying your product. Either they should have signed up to your email newsletters, signed up for a free trial or consumed a big chunk of your content. Perhaps they even attended one of your events. The job of the sales team is not to sell so much as it is to facilitate the buying process and get that underway, especially in B2B markets.
Know That Employees Are The Brand
Branding isn’t something that’s out there in the ether: it’s in every interaction your staff has with customers. It’s not just your sales team or marketing department that comes into contact with regular customers, it’s often a much larger swathe of your team.
A great way to leverage your team to sell your brand is to organize an event. Live events are fast becoming the marketing method of choice, all driven, according to Sourcemiddleeast, by the sheer amount of support businesses can now access. Companies can now outsource entire events to specialists so that they can concentrate on their own content. Using an event for marketing purposes gets your employees face to face with clients – a method which is far more cost-effective than conventional digital marketing.
Understand That Marketing Is About Expertise
Seeing marketing as a method of directly selling a product is naive. And yet, even trained marketing experts still sometimes fall into this trap.
Today’s marketing is about much more than just pushing “a bargain” or a great deal, or even product features. It’s about generating authority – making people believe that you’re the best in the business.
Pushing deals or products can be an effective short-term strategy. But if you want people to come back to your business, time and time again, a far better strategy is to gain their trust by setting yourself up as a leader in a specific field. In other words, you want to be more like PwC.
